Bits of Baseball

—Please, Andrew Luck, shave that awful, unbecoming beard! It is so wretched for a Stanford man, and causes me to question your intelligence. Just ask your dad, Oliver, if he ever wore such a thing when he was a college QB.

—-Since Phil Niekro pitched himself into the Hall of Fame, knuckleballing hasn’t been very rewarding for major league pitchers. This season, Tim Wakefield of the Red Sox and R.E. Dickey with the Mets have a combined record of 12-17. Each has won six times, Wakefield has lost six rimes and Dickey 11. Next time Wakefield wins, it will be the 200th in his career.

—-Nearly every sports nut is familiar with the name Wally Pipp, the Yankee who took a breather from his job as first baseman and lost it to Lou Gehrig forever. Since then, I’ve never seen an athlete with the name of Pipp until the other day—and this one, Frank, finished 5th in a U.S. Cycling race out West.

—-Well, I tried to tell the Braves in the spring that not bringing Matt Diaz back was a mistake. They needed his right-handed bat, and now they have confirmed it. Welcome home, Matt, right where you belonged.

—-Whew, this is driving a hard deal, making it possible to match Georgia and Boise State. Gary Stokan, the wheeler-dealer, is paying Georgia $1.7 million and Boise State $1.4 million to play the game. Plus paying Louisville $500,000 to give up its date with Georgia. And there are some other payouts in the deal that I’m not familiar with.

—-Another reason I like about Fredi Gonzalez as a manager. He says, “If I managed worrying about questions I’d be asked by the media, I’d quit. You can’t worry about stuff like that. When I make a move, I believe in it.”

—–I used to end these things with a “Name of the Week,” and it was fun then. Now, there a thousand names popping up in sports by the day that read like characters in a Middle Eastern mystery, so……Selah.